From: Eric Wong Date: 2013-07-19T08:18:27+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] Ruby mogilefs-client 3.7.0 released Ryan Davis wrote: > ZOMG WHY DON'T YOU USE GITHUB? IT IS SOOO MUCH EEEEEASIER LOL. Anyways, I've had many similar questions over the years but not on ruby-talk, so here goes... My distaste of corporate-controlled/single-vendor solutions is the reason I'm involved with Free Software in the first place. This also extends to my interest/involvement with MogileFS. I am very much a Free Software zealot[1] GitHub adds proprietary features, and I cannot endorse that. * their Pull Requests don't work with repos hosted outside of GitHub. git is supposed to be decentralized/distributed, yet GitHub ignores repos they don't host. As far as I know, these Pull Requests cannot even be disabled (unlike issues or wiki) The "git request-pull" command (in core git, but not well-known) works via email (or NNTP or anything) and does not care where the repo is (but it does ensure the correct branch is pushed) * GitHub is a single point of failure. I've seen users become so dependent on GitHub they lose the ability to use git (or even communicate(!)) without GitHub. GitHub supporters can say all they want about how git is still distributed, but folks still care and wonder why projects are not on GitHub. So yes, that's enough indication folks depend too much features exclusive to GitHub. The value GitHub provides is not the repository hosting itself, but as a communications platform (which they control). * the social network/graph is exclusive to their site, so non-GH-users are automatically second-class citizens. This wouldn't be too bad if I could create a new account for every project, except... * their ToS limits users to one account I believe identity is prismatic, even in the FOSS world. I hate having accomplishments/baggage being carried across projects. I maintain no personal webpage nor remotely-complete social networking profiles for this reason. Fuck badges. To their credit, GitHub has not yet introduced proprietary changes to the data model of git; only extensions to the UIs. And fortunately, several GH-using projects I care about do accept patches and pull-requests sent via email. I don't know what the future holds. Distributed/decentralized solutions _are_ harder to use and maintain. Also (at least in the US), residential Internet access is not friendly towards self-hosting. Even relying on mailing lists is a compromise and I wish for something truly decentralized for communications. [1] I'd never engage in campaigning style of the FSF, though